There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method

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It felt important to all of the writers on the staff that we approach it with, first of all, with respect. Because there are presumably going to be people watching it who were directly affected by that day, having lost loved ones, or friends, or family. But also we wanted to try to recapture that experience, that almost everybody that remembers that day had, of being outside it, of not knowing exactly what was happening. And there was a panic inherent in that. And we really get that, in particular though Ali Soufan, who’s half a world away, and cannot figure out what’s happening. And slowly over the course of the day it starts to dawn on him, “I think I lost my friend, I think I lost my mentor.” And to me, that captures something really fundamental about that day, through one of the characters we’ve come to know and love, rather than getting involved in some kind of re-created action sequence downtown. It just felt so wrong to us to go that route.

White dudes have this thing where they believe your best friend in the world can have opposing political ideas. You’re supposed to be able to have healthy debate and disagreeing shouldn’t harm your friendship. That’s gross and stupid. Its really easy to say that when all your disagreements are theoretical. Its easy to say when none of the laws passed actually effect your life. Fighting with your best friend about corporate regulations, school charters, educational funding, abortion, health care, voting restrictions, drug laws, taxes and all sorts of stuff is cool and lively because none of it is going to actually leave you in a bad spot. Its different for the rest of us. I can’t be friends with you if you think I shouldn’t be allowed to vote. We can’t be friends if you think my friends shouldn’t have the ability to designate whatever gender they want and have that be legally recognized. We can’t be friends if you think I don’t deserve health care. Or if you think native children should be ripped away from their cultures and people. We can’t be friends if you think closing down health care clinics in an attempt to end safe legal abortions is a good thing. All these theoretical political ideas and lively debates effect real people, and I won’t be friends with someone who disagrees with me on them. Because disagreement means you don’t see me or a whole bunch of my friends and family as human beings worthy of rights and respect.

When people moan about how politics use to be “civil” what they’re really complaining about is the entry into the debate of the people those policies actually effect. Bit hard to be “civil” when it’s your livelihood or your bodily rights on the line

Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world. It functions as an extreme form of inherited property and, like other systems in which inherited privilege is overwhelmingly determinant, it arouses little allegiance in those who inherit nothing. Many countries have made efforts, through welfare and education policy, to neutralise the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth. But “accidental advantages” rule at the global level: 97% of citizenship is inherited, which means that the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.

LPT: A real, effective apology has three parts: (1) Acknowledge how your action affected the person; (2) say you’re sorry; (3) describe what you’re going to do to make it right or make sure it doesn’t happen again. Don’t excuse or explain.

In a 2011 paper on the medical effects of scurvy, author Jason C. Anthony offers a remarkable detail about human bodies and the long-term presence of wounds. “Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”

Given the right—or, as it were, exactly wrong—nutritional circumstances, even a person’s oldest injuries never really go away. In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are mere catalogs of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.

How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art—change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.

Ian Svenonius is best enjoyed when the listener makes the decision to go with what may come and to not parse every statement for levels of absurdity. Chris Richards says, “The thing that people say, ‘that guys putting me on; or he’s always in ‘character’…my response is that we’re always performing our identities for each other. We talk differently to our dentist than we do to our grandma. Ian has a hyperawareness to that divide and the more I get to know him, everything that makes him unique, seems like an expression of truth to me. Even if he is puffing out his chest, trying to make you laugh, trying to make you think differently; I still think that’s a core part of who he is.”

Whether Svenonius is entirely sincere or entirely correct is entirely beside the point, if you begin with the belief that world, especially a supposed “counterculture,” while needing justice and progressiveness, also needs the genuinely strange, the—fuck it—(non-racist/fascist) provocateur. I ask him whether he himself currently feels alienated from a culture where even those ostensibly on his “side” don’t have a lot affection for provocative jive and gleeful contradiction. “I always felt that way,” he says. “That’s the perspective of every band I’ve been in; it’s us against them, you and I against the world. It’s always underground. ‘We’re hanging out in someone else’s world.’ It comes from living where I do, which is a very alienated landscape. That’s what I’m used to so that’s what I’m comfortable with. I really hate consensus. I don’t want to be a contrarian. Consensus doesn’t feel good.”